Dr. Michael Russum, left, checks patient Ruby Giron in Denver Health Medical Center’s primary care clinic located in a low-income neighborhood in southwest Denver. Under the new GOP health care proposal, which could roll back Medicaid expansion and take away subsidies to help pay for insurance, Denver Health could absorb a revenue loss, a problem that it will share with large public health systems across the country that serve low-income patients.

President Donald Trump speaks in the Roosevelt Room of the White House in Washington, during a meeting on healthcare.

The early version of the Trump administration’s plan to cure “Obamacare” is a prescription many — but not all — area health providers are having a hard time swallowing.

“These guys are not addressing structural issues (in U.S. health care delivery). They are focused on destruction and dismantling (the Affordable Care Act),” said Faisal Qazi, a Pomona neurologist.

While some Republican Party supporters of the Trump Administration’s American Health Care Act cite rapidly rising premiums as a reason the Obama administration’s health care plan wasn’t working, they ignore the fact that premiums were rising rapidly before the ACA was signed into law on March 23, 2010, said Qazi, who is an assistant professor of neurology at Western University of Health Sciences in Pomona.

“They need to establish a cause and effect. And even if they do, how can they justify all the cuts to Medicare?” he said.

“Low-income families, people with sick kids or elderly should be very fearful (of this plan), Qazi said.

On the other hand, Dr. Harvey Cohen, a gerontologist and internal medicine specialist in Rancho Cucamonga, said he is glad to see the Obamacare mandate for people to buy health insurance disappear under the Trump proposal.

“So many young people have decided to pay the penalty rather than to buy the insurance” because the penalty is far less money than the cost of insurance, he said.

“Hopefully (under the new plan) old people will be able to buy insurance as well as young people, so you have a mix in the system,” Cohen said.

Cohen also said he liked the fact that the ceiling for Health Savings Accounts, which provide tax advantages if people set aside money for later use on medical expenses, would be lifted under the American Health Care Act, “giving more control to families.”

“However, I have some concerns about the plan’s provisions to cut Medicaid,” he said.

“I don’t know what is going to happen. You have to do something to help people who might be the sickest people…who are using the ER as their primary care providers….If they don’t have insurance, then who is going to pay for this?” he asked. “This is troublesome…if something is not done about this, it will be catastrophic.”

Cohen said that he hopes that further refinements of the Trump healthcare proposal will include reform of medical malpractice insurance. By taking “ambulance chasers” — attorneys who file frivolous lawsuits after accidents — out of the equation, medical costs nationwide will drop.

To qualify for certification as a Federally Qualified Health Center, which is where the Obama administration funneled money to support the Affordable Care Act, SAC Health System disengaged from the Loma Linda University Health and incorporated as a separate entity that built the new 150,000-square-foot downtown San Bernardino campus on 215 Freeway frontage west of the San Manuel Stadium, said Nancy Young, SAC Health System president and CEO.

The facility opened late last year and has a capacity to see 200,000 patients annually.

Young said it was too early to say how the Trump plan will affect funding for Federally Qualified Health Plans which has had strong support by many administrations for several decades.

For now, nothing has changed at the SAC Health System campuses, she said.

In addition to the main campus one near the stadium, a clinic at the former Norton Air Force Base and one at 488 South K St. in San Bernardino are continuing to see patients as they have been.

“We have plenty of capacity to see patients,” Young said.

To underscore that nothing has changed, Young said there will be a health fair March 23 on the downtown San Bernardino campus, 250 South G St., celebrating that “health coverage for America is as it should be,” she said.

The event is on the seventh anniversary of the signing of the Affordable Care Act.

“(Area) residents are encouraged to continue using the plan,” she said, adding that people will be at the health fair to help sign-up those for services, if they haven’t done so already.

The Trump plan would mean that 15 million Americans would lose their coverage and “those that retain it would have weaker protections, higher costs, and worse coverage,” said Dr. Alex Mroszczyk-McDonald, who is completing a fellowship in sports medicine at Kaiser Permanente Fontana.

“Populations particularly impacted would be self-employed entrepreneurs, independent contractors, those who work seasonally and especially the older and sicker patients in our nation,” he said.

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